Most political views are shaped not by principle, but by whose ox is being gored or whose calf is being fattened.

That explains most of the fervor about those who insist the government should "crack down" on big spenders in political campaigns. But "big" is all in the point of view, isn't it?

There's a great column by Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition, that shows how champions of freedom of speech recoiled at the recent Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. When they should be celebrating, they lamented. Go figure.

"The new decision places a huge, nearly insurmountable, constitutional barrier in the way of laws restricting speech, particularly political speech, on the basis of the legal status of the speaker," Scheer says.

I have been defending, to the disapproval of most of our commenters, the Supremes' striking down of the part of the McCain-Feingold law that forbade advocacy organizations organized as corporations from making any electioneering-type statements during the period prior to an election. I do agree, however, that if restrictions on campaigning are to be loosened -- and I would loosen them much more than the Supremes have, including getting rid of contribution caps (Eugene McCarthy would have been almost impossible if they had been in place when he challenged LBJ in 1968; his campaign was mostly funded by GM heir Stewart Mott, who in my mind had the right to spend his money as he wished) -- then full disclosure of who is financing both candidates and independent expenditures is justified and necessary.

The Sunlight Foundation, a recent addition to the panoply of advocacy (that's lobbying) outfits in Babylon-on-the-Potomac has a pretty good set of proposals to this end. They argue that current disclosure laws are not adequate to today's technology and the brave new world the high court has ushered in. They propose seven reforms:

1) Requiring corps and unions to file independent expenditures with the FEC, 2) reports to the SEC on corporate expenditures on politics, 3) tightening lobbying disclosure laws to require real-time online disclosure of contacts, 4) requiring ads to have full and clear disclosure of who paid for them 5) monthly instead of quarterly campaign finance reports filed electronically, 6) Tough sanctions for those who break disclosure rules, 7) info posted in a searchable, sortable, downloadable, machine-readable format. One might quibble with a point or two or want to see actual language before endorsing such disclosure laws, but these look like a pretty good starting-point.

Most observers have said it was inappropriate of Justice Samuel Alito to shake his head and mouth the words "not true" while Obama was bashing the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision last night. Maybe so. The tradition has been for Supreme Court justices to sit stony-faced through SOTU speeches. Whether inappropriate or not -- and there's probably a stronger case that it was inappropriate for the president to directly criticize the court while 6 of its 9 members sat in front of him, something not done in previous SOTU's -- Alito was right on the substance. The policy that was a century old forbids corporations from donating to candidates directly from corporate treasuries, and that policy was left untouched by the CU decision. Instead it reversed a 7-year-old law that forbade organizations organized as corporations, including non-profit advocacy groups like the NRA and ACLU, from making independent expenditures on issues important in an election during the period immediately prior to an election -- arguably the time when political speech should be freest and most robust. That law was a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

As for the worry that foreign corporations might donate to U.S. political campaigns, that was handled by a law in 1996 that forbids such donations, which the court didn't touch. Obama was demagoguing in an inaccurate fashion (that's as polite a way as I know to put it).

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, as several people have noted, marks the first time the word "blog" has been used in a Supreme Court decisions, to wit:

"Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds. The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech," - Justice Anthony Kennedy

Does this mark the entrance of blogs into the semi-official realm of the respectable? Or will it turn out to be a high point to be followed by a decline in their influence and importance now that the establishment has recognized their presence? Or something else altogether?

One of the dirty secrets (besides the fact that they favor incumbents) of restrictions on campaign funding and spending is that they give newspapers and other media companies extra influence on the political process since nobody has yet been bold enough to legislate that newspaper endorsements and news-slanting should be counted as corporate contributions or outlawed as such. So media companies have had a vested interest in keeping those restrictions in place. So discount to some extent those noble-sounding arguments about clean elections and limiting the poisonous influence of (some but not all) corporations.